US immigration authorities said on Friday that they had detained 475 people, most of them South Korean nationals, when hundreds of federal agents raided Hyundai’s sprawling manufacturing site in Georgia, where the Korean automaker makes electric vehicles.
The Pew Research Center, citing preliminary Census Bureau data, said the US labour force lost more than 1.2 million immigrants from January through July.
I’ve seen this article a whole bunch now, and I have yet to see anyone day if these SK workers were even here under false visas or something? They say they haven’t been charged, but are they just rounding up “legitimate” immigrant labor now, not even holding to their own flimsy pretense?
Yes.
Umm… Trump regime already removed their hoods off about supposedly removing illegal immigrants. It is pogrom towards any foreigners.
from another source
Wow such a typical big corpo move. Hundreds of people working for Hyundai, none employed by them. Legal issues can be punted to contractors, while they review themselves real hard (they promise).
Thank you! That’s… not much better, but at least it hasn’t gotten quite as bad as it’s going to…?
sigh. This shit is so fucking exhausting. just. fuck.
Using falsely visas is SK’s fault, but raiding $7.6 billion plant with excessive force is too much. They could have given a warning and time to clear up the visa paperwork beforehand, but they didn’t.
cruelty is the point
It was an EV plant.
The disruptions are by design.
Trump is going to take over the manufacturing plant.
Appreciate the context. Still feels excessive, but at least more warranted than a lot of their other activities. I really hope they just go after corporations, but I doubt they will.
ice is only mostly going after immigrants that are only in one place, the allegedled undocumented or illegals, are probably not going to be working in such public areas.
I know this isn’t a real source but I know someone who works at this plant and he said most were here on 3 month visit visas.
Essentially they’d be paid back in SK for their 3 months of work and would cycle in and out in rotations.
Out of all the insane raids ICE has conducted, this one is actually quite a big find since it’s Hyandai essentially bypassing visa requirements for cheap labor.
Most likely ICE isn’t sure whether to charge the immigrant workers or fine Hyandai since Hyandai is the one that offered them jobs and told them the process of working under a visit visa.
I think they will likely get deported without any criminal charges or individual fines, but will obviously get blacklisted from any future entrance into the US.
So many incorrect spellings of Hyundai, hopefully ice does the same and the case goes nowhere.
햔대 ㅋㅋ
하얀 데이
they keep saying “white day” instead of “modern” 현대 lol
Samsung must have corporate beef with them because my autocorrect is set to Hyandai and not Hyundai lmao
It will suggest misspelled words if you keep using them.
I am deeply skeptical of your story. This is the kind of thing that’s super-easy to prove, and I feel like if they were finding real immigration fraud at this plant, they would be half-likely to actually try to enforce against it since that was exactly what they did the raid for and it would have been detected in 2 seconds once they started checking IDs. And even if not, it would be half-likely that that aspect of the story would leak to the press in some form at some point.
The whole thing where your phone autocorrected a real word to a totally nonexistent word makes me further skeptical of the whole thing. I won’t say either is impossible, but they both seem unlikely.
It seems plausible to me. Large corporations doing weird stuff are nothing new. I don’t know how much they’d save by doing this, and it’s obviously not worth it, especially these days, but I can certainly see them entertaining the idea, or implementing it. Unlikely as it is.
Oh, I can certainly believe that Hyundai would do this. My thought process actually went something along the lines of:
I think if the explanation for “Hyandai” had been “oh my bad lol” then I wouldn’t have really felt any particular strong skepticism, but that aspect pushed it over the edge to me.
I’m just gonna chalk it up to the Samsung keyboard being complete garbage lol, I was joking about the corporate beef.
As for Hyundai, yeah it sounds sketchy because it’s “I heard from someone” which may as well just be made up, but I didn’t add any details because it gets a little too close to disclosing personal info.
But tbf this is lemmy and I would have questioned the same thing, so here goes:
I live <2 hours away from one of Hyundai’s Georgia plants and personally know someone who works for Hyundai at raided plant who gave all the details of what he knows (along with some pictures of helicopters during the raid lol).
According to him, they primarily targeted the LG portion of the facility, which is across the road from the Hyundai section. They had everyone come outside for the lineup and verification of ID, before they took whoever they wanted away. In his own words, it was a “massive operation and totally overkill for whatever they discovered.”
A group of us were discussing the implications, because we always assumed the large Korean immigrant population in our area was primarily here on legal work visas (they are, 500 is nothing compared to the current population). We just didn’t expect Hyundai/LG to be skirting around for cheap foreign labor via visit visas.*
He doesn’t know how DHS/ICE figured them out or how Hyundai was documenting this process, but he did hear people talk about the visit visa process long before this, meaning it wasn’t some huge secret (DHS may already have been aware of this a long time ago). There are other similar visa exploit tricks several companies use that DHS has recently been trying to shutdown or change (stuff like multiple applications for a visa for only one person to increase draw rate).
Anyways, the general concenus was that even though the visit visa was providing jobs, it was technically exploit labor since workers would not have been receiving any US employment benefits or equivalent salary. Hyundai is primarily the one at fault here, but they really didn’t need to do a massive raid for this. They could have just as easily sent a single squad to show up and do ID checks, or even just knock on home addresses of everyone they identified on a non work visa.
Obviously no one wants to give ICE any more ammo for their existence, but I think they’ve been pocketing this and waited for a while so they can get all the clout with some big headlines after a couple of months of desperately detaining anyone even remotely foreign.
You can find details about both the visit visas and LG plant corroborated in the news. Ex: https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-us-georgia-raid-hyundai-24d990562f5ac20e7d3e983a77a4f7ff
*fwiw it does seem more like they are dancing around the increasingly stricter visa requirements to get work done, and not just some cheap labor exploit, especially considering the amount of immigrants here on valid work visas for all the other jobs.
Seems like it. Pretty sure all they care about is being able to report “we arrested 450 illegals” regardless of the actual truth of the situation.
and by ‘illegals’ they mean ‘brown people’ (regardless of origin or nationality or legal status to work here).
or even actual brownness. i have a friend from Ukraine that got called “wetback”. worth noting, she’s a US citizen. so… you know… look. racists aren’t exactly known for their critical thinking skills
Yeah. If you look at what the directives have been from above, it’s very very obvious in retrospect that ICE would be just wandering around arresting people completely at random, because they will literally get in trouble if they do literally anything else.